Introducing elasticity and adaptation into the optical domain toward more efficient and scalable optical transport networks

There is growing recognition that we are rapidly approaching the physical capacity limit of standard optical fiber. It is important to make better use of optical network resources to accommodate the ever-increasing traffic demand to support the future Internet and services. We first introduce an architecture, enabling technologies, and the benefits of recently proposed spectrum-efficient and scalable elastic optical path networks. In these networks, the required minimum spectral resources are adaptively allocated to an optical path based on traffic demand and network conditions. We then present possible adoption scenarios from current rigid optical networks to elastic optical path networks. We also discuss some possible study items that are relevant to the future activities of ITU-T. These items include optical transport network (OTN) architecture, structure and mapping of the optical transport unit, automatically switched optical network (ASON) control plane issues, and some physical aspects with possible extension of the current frequency grid.